itallet
Mime and Pantomime
Itv C I, I V E It A N E S
other • productions withered into insignifi- cance. The triumph of the Russians was in the dramatic power and conviction of their reading. 1 he cobwebs were gone; the ballet stood revital- ised and recharged for our own generation.
Immediately the cry went up: what was Covent Garden going to do about it? Giselle, In one form or another, had been in the Royal Ballet repertory ever since 1933 as a chocolate- box museum piece, dusty, styleless and in itself
It was of sonic use to ballet critics who wanted a ready example of the Royal Ballet's genteel ineptitude in handling the classics, and it served as a tarnished frame for the 'ballerina dancing Giselle; but that was about the sum of it. 'Then about a year ago Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes went as guest artists to Finland. where they danced in the Lavrovsky production.
For the first time, it seems, Covent 'Garden felt that their own Giselle needed serious atten- non. Now to me the one obvious thing to do (and it was equally obvious • in 1956) was to pocket our national pride and ask Lavrovsky to reproduce his Moscow version of the ballet for us. Instead; Covent Garden decided to re- hash the ballet themselves. They invited Madame Tamara Karsavina, herself a notable Giselle: to recall details of the old Petipa production of 1860. They went back to the Gautier scenario to see if anything could be picked up fronythere; they obviously took many hints from the -Lav- rovsky; they put Frederick Ashton in charge of the entire production. and restored admirable chunks of the original Adam ;core. The result. which was first shown in New York and reached Covent Garden last week, is .self-e% idcntly a vast improvement on its predecessor. Innumer- able illogicalities have been tidied up in the action, while much important new material has been added. In most of its details this is a service- able, even a good; Giselle. But the gap between this fascinating pantomime and the revclationary Lavrovsky production is essentially as wide as ever.
The first performance was not' perhaps the fairest test. Margot Fonteyn has never (in my view) been a distinguished Giselle, for here she acts with mind and face rather than heart and body. Michael Somes has a certain stiff-necked nobility as Albrecht, but his interpretation is likewise skin-deep, and his dancing on the first night looked strained and jerky. But the huge difference between the Bolshoi Giselle and the newcomer lies in its basic attitude to the drama. Lavrovsky has seen that Albrecht is the central figure of the ballet, and shown the story of his regeneration from an adolescent playboy seducer to a mature. sensitive man. Giselle redeems him not simply from death, but from his own mon- strous nature. Hera the ballet found a coherent, credible plan, the wild driving force of a motive, and the drama was consequently presented in a w ay we could feel. The new Royal Ballet ver- sion makes no genuine attempt to create charac- ters in depth, but restricts itself to seeing that the dramatic framework holds together. I must here confine myself to one •example out of many, so I will take the ending. In the Lavrovsky ver- sion the hero is left, alone and pondering, trans- figured by the visions of the night. In the Royal Ballet version, his aristocratic fiancee, Bathilde, comes rushing into the wood to dole out for- giveness and matrimony in the last feW bars of the eleventh hour. This unlikely return to Gautier's original scenario is cheap and uncon- vincing. possessing nothing of the poignant dignity and truth found in the Russian reading.
It has always seemed a tragedy to me that Covent Garden persist with the semaphore system of mime current in St. Petersburg at the turn of the century; the present Giselle actually adds to their stock of sign-language dumb-play. For genuine mime that needs no specialised, decoding and is as articulate in its way as speech, one should see' Marcel- Marceau, who is giving a short season at the Saville Theatre. Marceau is a great mime in the tradition of Deburau; he could teach something to almost every ballet dancer I have ever seen. He is a whey-faced comedian, stumbling through life with bitterness in his laughter. He is a Charlie Chaplin with ulcers, a clown-Hamlet who does conjuring tricks for a living. His mime is breathtaking in its virtuosity and style; he can fill an empty stage with non-existent things and people, and he can make you laugh with him and at him all at once.
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